The Obama administration has decided to continue to imprison without trials nearly 50 detainees at the Guantánamo Bay (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/national/usstatesterritoriesandpossessions/guantanamobaynavalbasecuba/index.html?inline=nyt-geo) military prison in Cuba because a high-level task force has concluded that they are too difficult to prosecute but too dangerous to release, an administration official said on Thursday.

Let's hope they don't send these guys to Illinois.

the administration has decided that nearly 40 other detainees should be prosecuted for terrorism or related war crimes. And the remaining prisoners, about 110 men, should be repatriated or transferred to other countries for possible release,

The arithmetic would say that at least 1/2 the detainees are nasty guys.

But the determination about which category to put each detainee in leaves other questions unanswered. For example, of the roughly 110 detainees who are set to be transferred to other countries, about 30 are Yemenis, the official said. The administration recently halted transfers to Yemen in the wake of the attempted bombing of an airplane bound for Detroit on Christmas — a plot believed to have been developed by an affiliate of Al Qaeda (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/a/al_qaeda/index.html?inline=nyt-org) based in Yemen.

Oops, 110 they don't know what to do with ... but it would appear that they're guessing that going back to Yemen would not be a great idea for them.

I never quite understood why Gitmo had to be closed. If the objections were to conditions there or Constitutional rights, then if those objections were remedied, why is it necessary to spend a couple of million dollars to refurbish a prison in Illinois to confine them? What has the location of the confinement got to do with the Constitutional rights issues?

I'm at least glad that the administration determined that some of these guys are too dangerous to release.